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Late on a Tuesday evening in April, I received a paid request to edit a professional paper. I love when paid requests arrive magically, but there was a catch: The editing needed to take place by Wednesday afternoon.
That particular Wednesday had a high of 84 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, DC. I had one side hustle-related task scheduled for the day, but I often book two side hustle tasks on days when I have time. However, I already had a two-hour block labeled “POOL TIME” in my calendar immediately following my workday. I was looking forward to reading the end of the Stacey Abrams thriller While Justice Sleeps poolside and had my first Sam Adams Porch Rocker of the year in the fridge for the occasion of a warm April day.
I did not make any money editing that day, but the pool was lovely.
Saying No to Work
Life is more important than work. Chances are, your life will improve if you say no to work a bit more than you do now. My 9-to-5 friends often rebut this concept when I use an example of turning down freelance income, but it applies to any kind of work. Turning down work from a salaried position is also even easier for me: If someone from my full-time job as a government consultant tried to get me to skip my pool time to do work, the answer would be an even harder no because they would not pay me any extra money to do the work!
I am not suggesting saying no to work for the sake of saying no. Say yes to work when your life can accommodate it. Say no to work when your life should take priority. Regardless of your answer, your life should determine whether you take on work.
Saying yes to work can sometimes help prioritize life. When my day job asks if I can stay late for a meeting on a rainy Thursday when I have no plans, I say yes so I can pay myself back by leaving an hour early on Friday to start my drive to the beach sooner. However, if I had important plans on that rainy Thursday, I would say no. Life priorities dictate your willingness to put in extra time.
Telling Not Asking
“I am online early to cover this meeting, so do you mind if I sign off early today?”
“Is it okay if I take leave for my sister’s wedding?”
“Do you mind if I take leave the week of July 11th to go to the beach with my family?”
If any of these feel familiar, stop asking permission to live your life. Never ask permission to go on vacation, leave work after putting in full hours, or attend an important event. Just live.
How does someone take leave without a leave request? Inform an employer about upcoming leave. I add my leave to my team’s leave calendar well in advance, send Outlook invitations to the individuals who work with me daily, and announce my upcoming leave in the preceding weekly staff meeting. If I have the flexibility, I try to avoid taking leave during the biggest work events of the year. Planning leave early makes it nearly impossible for your employer to take issue with the leave since your coworkers have not planned their leave yet. Plan early, communicate early, and take your leave whenever you want.
If you inform rather than request but your employer tries to say no, stand your ground. If you have paid leave, you are entitled to use it. If you do not have paid leave, your employer will not pay you anyway and should be able to live with your brief absence. When an employer has nobody that can cover your responsibilities for a typical leave period, employers may even threaten your stability with the employer. How do you deal with that? First, do not feel guilty: Their poor planning is not your problem. Second, understand that an excessively reactive employer means you have the power: If your employer cannot cover your time on leave, then you must have valuable skills and/or knowledge that warrant at least a raise, and potentially a promotion to a leadership role where you teach a junior employee your skills. Take confidence in your position.
Prioritizing Life with Financial Goals
As one of our readers, you likely have financial goals that guide some decision-making. Working towards financial goals is ideal, but can be overdone. Particularly if you are working towards a large goal like eliminating debt quickly or achieving FIRE, the temptation to prioritize income-generating activities above everything else can lead to missing the joyful activities that happen each day.
For employees who have any paid leave, taking days off is part of your compensation as much as your paycheck. If you opt to not use your leave, you are devaluing your time by lowering your overall compensation. For those without paid leave, whether employed by someone else or self-employed, taking days for yourself can feel more difficult and counterproductive to your goals. However, when a life event is important to you, choose life, even if it means forgoing money. This feels difficult, particularly before you build an emergency fund and create financial stability. Regardless of your financial stage, it is worth remembering that you can always make more money. You cannot reclaim hours, days, or years of life. Besides, taking time away periodically leaves you refreshed and makes you more productive!
When earning more at the expense of missing life activities becomes tempting, remember why you set your financial goals: Your financial goals should exist to improve your life. Skipping all life events until your financial goals are achieved is counterproductive. Set financial goals that improve your life. Live your life on the journey to achieve those goals.
How to Prioritize Life
For the natural life-prioritizers, go forth and wing it to prioritize life.
For anyone who has ever asked permission to take leave, gotten stuck working late, or said yes to income when competing priorities or stress already existed, you need to plan a little.
I talk with many folks who resist scheduling their leisure time because the act of scheduling is not leisurely. Unfortunately, this resistance has a negative side effect: Not scheduling your leisure time is almost guaranteed to result in less leisure time.
While Cal Newport mostly discusses scheduling for the purposes of maximizing work performance, his disciplined scheduling advice applies to all areas of life: “Your goal is not to stick to a given schedule at all costs; it’s instead to maintain, at all times, a thoughtful say in what you’re doing with your time going forward[.]” When you do not put the fun, exciting, relaxing, life-changing, and memorable events on your calendar, you choose not to acknowledge them with equal importance to your work activities, increasing the probability that they will never happen.
In our household, we schedule fun meticulously. We have a “Sports and Travel Schedule” each year where we enter my rugby matches and tournaments, Patrick’s races, all professional sporting events we want to attend, vacations, weddings and other big events (retirement parties, big birthdays, our favorite federal judge’s portrait ceremony), family visits, weekends away, fundraisers, and more. While we still call it the “Sports and Travel Schedule,” it has grown to cover more than simply sports and travel, but it still gives us one spot to both check before making other plans.
Why schedule fun activities so meticulously? Finishing the rugby season on a Sunday and leaving for the beaches of Turkey on Tuesday. Pairing a Ragnar for Patrick that is in close proximity to a rugby tournament for me. Recognizing that my parents are at home in Connecticut the two weeks before a friend’s Boston wedding and extending our trip to visit them while still returning to Washington, DC in time for a Nationals game in the Diamond Club two days after the wedding. Discovering we can plan a slightly late 70th birthday celebration for my mom with the Red Sox-Dodgers series.
Those are just some of the events this year that we stitched together thanks to our “Sports and Travel Schedule.”
In addition to the schedule that covers large events, I keep a personal daily calendar that is quite intricate. It has my work priorities in the same place as my personal priorities. This helps me find the best blocks for workouts, prioritize when I want to watch a game, keep track of happy hours, and find a pool time block to enjoy a sunny day.
The day-to-day calendar finds me more pool hours. The “Sports and Travel Schedule” finds me more beach days. Together, they let me prioritize life over work. Earning money can wait until the game is over for the day or I fly back after a two-week escape.
Right now, the work can wait while I start summer early at the beach in the Mediterranean.
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